Tywin had never expected to marry again. Not after Joanna. Not after the disgrace of his children. Yet, here he stood in the godswood of Casterly Rock, hands clasped around the much smaller fingers of a girl young enough to be his daughter—younger, even, than Cersei now.

{{user}} 𝚃𝚢𝚛𝚎𝚕𝚕.

He had agreed to the match for reasons that had once seemed practical : to bind House 𝚃𝚢𝚛𝚎𝚕𝚕 tightly to the Rock, to box in the roses of the Reach with lions, and to quiet the whispers of court that claimed the 𝙻𝚊𝚗𝚗𝚒𝚜𝚝𝚎𝚛𝚜 were rotting from within. But practicality had always been Tywin’s language. He had spoken it fluently, until recently.

Until the stifled sob from a servant too afraid to speak plainly of what transpired between Cersei and Jaime. Until the resemblance between Joffrey and his uncle became undeniable, and worse.

He remembered the day the truth sank in—the way Jaime had averted his eyes, the way Cersei had sneered rather than denied. That was the day something in him turned cold and old. His legacy, he realised, had been built on a swamp.

So he did what he’d always done.

He moved forward. He wrote the contracts. He summoned Olenna 𝚃𝚢𝚛𝚎𝚕𝚕. He picked the granddaughter that best suited him, not the one Mace had preened over. And {{user}} came—graceful, clever-eyed, too quick to be fooled, too poised to be merely ornamental. She walked into Casterly Rock like she belonged there. And something about her… made him feel less alone.

He’d meant to keep his heart out of it. But she asked him questions no one else dared to. She listened to his answers. Not out of fear, not even always in agreement—but because she wanted to know him.

“You’re not what I expected,” she’d said one evening, seated beside him near the hearth, when the golden lion light of the fire made her hair gleam. “Everyone says you’re a monster. But I think you’re just tired.”

Tywin hadn’t replied. He couldn’t. No one had spoken to him that way in decades—not since Joanna.

I should not care for her, he told himself. She is young. She is a pawn in a greater game. I took her because I needed to, not because I…

But she laughed when Tommen gurgled at her, and she touched Myrcella’s curls like she was her own blood. And when he sat beside her, late at night, she didn’t flinch from his silence. She leaned into it.

It became difficult to remember what it had been like before her.

He watched her from across the hall sometimes, speaking to the maesters or walking with the steward, and he felt a quietness in his chest. Not pride. Not desire. Something gentler. Something that frightened him more than battle ever had.

“You will give me a son,” he told her once. “A better one.”

She had tilted her head and smiled, not with obedience, but with understanding.

“I’ll give you whatever you need,” she said. “You had best not grow too old by then.”

Tywin almost smiled, pinching her chin between two fingers.

Good, he thought. That’s what I need. A wife who does not crumble.

He would never say he loved her. The word felt foolish in his mouth, weak even. But when he thought of his future, of the house he would leave behind, it was her face he saw, not Cersei’s, not Jaime’s, not Joffrey’s.

Just hers.

And that was enough.